Valery Hiltunen. Herzen and Margarita

Herzen and Margarita
Valery Hiltunen

Publication date: February 27, 2004

The other day I took a foreign friend to a bad apartment on Sadovaya, house 10. The main attraction, as many people think, of Moscow. If anyone has not forgotten, it was there that Woland lived with all his honest company . That house is also famous for the fact that it was from here that the blind Fanny Kaplan came out on the day when someone shot at Lenin. She was seized there, they seemed to get to the bottom of everything, and she herself was set on fire and buried near the ancient Kremlin walls, the poet Bedny was also active there, adding kerosene, although, in the light of the gradually emerging information, he did it completely in vain, because it was not Vladimir Ilyich who intended to kill, and even Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov, whom, having learned about this, Lenin later gave a heart attack and did not appear at his funeral.

But he believed him at first! He was a brilliant performer, guessing the intention of the main leader right away. Vladimir Ilyich will just say thoughtfully: “It would be nice for us, my friend, to start monumental propaganda!” - and Yakov Mikhailovich already put his hand to the visor: “They are transporting, I gave orders just in case, they are already transporting cornerstones from the Urals, and soon they will be in Moscow.” Monuments were made from those stones - including that anecdotal stele that stands almost directly above the place where Fanny was burned. On that stone, Lenin planned to immortalize the names and surnames of all his great predecessors, but either the handwriting was completely bad, or the Kremlin typist was a little drunk that day, there were no surnames on this phallic symbol, in particular Herzen. Lenin was at first saddened, then he beat the typist, then he waved his hand - the country is like this, no one can really do anything, and since then this irregular revolutionary pillar has stood, past which three heroes from the Kremlin walk every day from their semi-aquariums over the grave of one unknown soldier companies.

Previously, there were no transparent awnings over post number one, and the post itself was further away, near the Mausoleum, and one bourgeois bitch overheard from behind the bushes what exactly these fellows were talking about as they left their post and published it in a foreign magazine. I read this magazine - it was my turn to accompany the waste paper from the editorial special storage to a special all-Moscow incinerator, where Playboys, Times and Le Points were first crushed into small pieces and always in front of witnesses. And all this happened to the howling of radio jammers, which consumed the energy of the entire Saratov hydroelectric power station. If those times return, then now the new Zeya hydroelectric power station will be used - the pride of the red-haired Chubais, however, by that time he will, God forbid, become completely gray.

“God willing” - I mean that those times will not return for a long time. Of course, we cannot avoid them completely - one of our most knowledgeable Duma leaders, my namesake, a colleague of our Guarantor in Germany, once said that such an alternation of powers would be correct. Twice for four years - conservatives, and once - liberals. Or the radicals - well, in general, those who are like in that Okudzhava song about the metro: “Those on the right are standing, but those who are walking must always keep to the left.”

Those soldiers weren’t even talking about Herzen at all. About the weather - they were cold. And about the women - they wanted to love.

In this sense, little has changed. Yesterday, for example, I pestered with a question about Herzen’s absence two chevaliers (this is “cavalier” in French from the word “horse”), that is, two mounted policemen, one of whom was a lady, but also sat with her butt on a blanket decorated with a coat of arms ), but they obviously mistook me for that and asked me to leave the Alexander Garden in an amicable way. There were also young skateboarders there; they had never heard of Herzen, and when I asked who was buried here and in honor of what, one student replied that he had read in a malicious magazine that civilian female bones were lying here by mistake; It is also unclear why it is necessary to guard the land of two neighboring states - out of twelve cities and hero fortresses, six are now located in Ukraine and Belarus.

We also talked about the latest anti-gas attacks by President Lukashenko. Shkolyar said that Belarusians are generally slow, but if you tease them too much, they will also become like the Chechens and will derail trains and blow up gas pipelines, or maybe they already blew them up recently in the Ramensky district. - Why would they tear up gas pipelines? - I asked. “They, the suicide bombers, have female logic,” the student told me, and oh God, if you can still hear me, let us at least have a truce on the Belarusian front. They say that the exact copy of any person is his great-grandson, and the great-grandfathers of the current Jacobs and Yankees were, whatever you say, the best partisans in the world... In neighboring Hochland, the Lebedin Gestapo received from Hitler a letter for the quietest place in the entire occupation zone, and the Belarusians so they didn’t tame it.

I walked away from sin, away from the Alexander Garden, from this fifth column... Who are they, our children? How much different unexpected information we have crammed into their young heads in recent years! A newsstand was selling a multi-volume collection of Suvorov's works - where he scolds the scumbag Marshal "Stukachevsky" with all his might, and proposes to decorate the monument to Zhukov with a fountain of human blood. Is he, this Suvorov, a bitch? But in Solzhenitsyn’s books, much more bad words are said about the Soviet era, but he is a hero and a righteous man? Or no longer? My dream is to arrange a duel between them (or a duet, whatever happens) regarding that War. And if they don’t want to sit at the round table, then I’ll hold a literary trial of both masters at once, as my great-grandfathers did in the distant twenties. With all due respect and with any legal profession, even under television cameras.

This requires academic precision. Otherwise, big-eyed uncles will see from behind the Kremlin walls that our young skateboarders are racking their brains in the garden over very slippery questions, and they will ban the wrong books - first by Suvorov, then, you see, by Solzhenitsyn, and Yeltsin, and Gorbachev, and so on further - throughout the alphabet... Yes, we started about Bulgakov, about a not very good apartment and about one-cell neighbors, spoiled by the housing problem and howling - and you wouldn’t howl if your entrance was covered with thousands of Bulgakov fans with quotes from “The Master” and Margarita" - up to the roof? Not on the dirt! The frightened Moscow government issued a safe conduct to the residents: There was no such Bulgakov Museum in the house on Sadovaya, there is not and there is not going to be, and there is nothing to show there, and in general - in residential buildings there are museums only on the first floors, sleep peacefully behind the iron door and under the protection of video cameras of a private agency, which, ironically, it seems, is called "Bulgakov House".

The gentlemen and comrades from the cultural department lied a little about the first floor. Goldenweiser's museum-apartment is right under the very roof of that residential building on Pushkinskaya, where the ballerina was previously attached to the dome. This is the same Goldenweiser who even brought Lenin to tears with his performance of “Appassionata”.

That apartment is good, decorous - Beethoven has few fans, they do not fight with their neighbors on the planet, their idol, like Swan Lake, is beyond suspicion in any balance of power.

The last person to raise his hand to this music was Goebbels. At the height of hostilities, he organized an international Beethoven conference - specifically to prove that “ta-ta-ta-ta” is Death, and not Fate at all. The BBC was annoying the Germans every day with this “ta-ta-ta-ta”, they also loaded one of their Saratov hydroelectric power stations into jammers, but Beethoven turned a deaf ear to them...

There are eras when the blind (like Homer) and the deaf see everything correctly (Bach, by the way, also wrote on buns and inserted them into his ears - this is how doctors prescribed treatment for his hearing loss).

It’s more difficult with Bulgakov. The right, and the left, and the center, and Annushka, and people's artists are suspicious of him... And why is that all? A particularly smart prodigy gave me the secret. I asked him: what did you find in that “Master”. “I found an image there that is not even in the Bible,” this young man told me. - Woland is not a force of evil, it is a force that has learned to control both evil and good. That's how it should be. But many do not understand how this can be. And that's why they're afraid...

Shouldn't you and I sign up for Wolandy too, dear reader?